Posted
by
timothyon Sunday August 07, 2011 @05:25AM
from the paternal-instinct dept.

MojoKid writes "Comcast is launching 'Internet Essentials,' a new initiative offering discounted Internet access and home computers to families that meet low income requirements. The program was mandated as a requirement of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal, earlier this year. In that way, it's very similar to AT&T's Naked DSL program, which AT&T was required to offer as a condition of its merger with BellSouth. Internet Essentials will be available wherever Comcast offers broadband, which means 39 states."

I'm a little upset this is only for people with children in school. If you're just poor, you're out of luck. I am specifically thinking of seniors, but also the unemployed and perhaps homes with children who are either too young for school, or children in college. For the unemployed, they could use it to try and find work. With gas prices being what they are, $9.95 is much cheaper than driving/bussing to the unemployment office or library to use a computer, and cheaper than subscribing to a local newspaper. They could also gain job skills if they wanted to use it to find free training materials online.

As for seniors, I think there have been plenty of studies that show a wide array of activities -- almost all of them available via the internet -- can help keep their minds agile, and stave off senility. It might not be much, but it could reduce some burden on Medicare, as seniors could live on their own longer rather than living in a nursing home, or injure themselves less.

I think the potential economic benefit of internet for the poor is more than enough to justify whatever subsidies or tax breaks Comcast is getting for doing it.

I agree with everything you said, and would add that affordable internet access is a necessity in the US today. Most employers will just assume you have it, and to access the internal shift scheduling system you'll need home internet access. It's just as bad, if not worse, than not having a phone. If an employer found out you had no home internet access they'd probably skip over you just as often as if they found out you had no phone number or home address; you're just not worth the hassle. Obviously this isn't true for all jobs, but definitely for some.

The US model is fundamentally broken because it used public money to finance private infrastructure. The lines themselves should be public, which the government leases to private business to provide internet service, and if a new company wants to start up, they get the same chance to compete as the big guys. Until we have something close to that we're not going to have fairness or equity in the distribution of this essential utility. Private enterprise alone is not going to take care of the poor and their needs, despite the fact that there are some basic needs common to everyone, regardless of their income. It's just not profitable to provide poor people with internet.

Not giving those people the hand up they need hurts everyone in the long run, it's a shame that the mindset of conservatism seems to be not to do what is ultimately most fiscally responsible, but what perpetuates their notion of capitalist karmic justice. You can't help the poor, because they deserve to be punished. They deserve to be punished, or at least allowed to suffer, so they will improve themselves. You don't get to examine if they have the means for self improvement or not, that's beyond the scope of the notion of justice that conservatism holds. If you didn't deserve to be treated like that, you wouldn't be poor.

Doing too much for people is also bad, but we are soooo far away from that in the US that we can afford to go full tilt toward The Welfare State without risking going over the ledge of left-wing extremism and taking TOO much care of people. We've lost our center in the US. Conservatives see us drifting farther to the left, when in reality we are pegged to the right and the momentum is still in that direction.

The lines themselves should be public, which the government leases to private business to provide internet service

Why does the government have to be involved at all? Why not let individuals own the last-mile infrastructure. When you buy a house, you also buy the connection from the cabinet to your house. Take it a step further, and also buy a share in a cooperative that owns the connection between the cabinet and the exchange. Transit providers then compete to offer service to the neighbourhood.

A simple solution is to let businesses own and operate the last mile, but implement some regulations that require these business to sell raw bandwidth for reasonable prices to any other business wishing to provide a service.

That is actually how it's done in the US - it's regulated by a local (or State) utilities rate body. The company argues for a new rate, the body decides what the rate should really be, and that's that. Somehow I don't think giving it all to Government would work in the US, since rates are already set by Government in the first place...

now it would be more accurate to say, most employers of people who frequent this site assume those employees have access the the internet.

There still are a good number of people who won't use the net even if you hand it them for free. It took our family years before our grandmother consented to even having a computer! We only convinced her that with a computer and internet she could get pictures of her grandkids daily, let alone e-mail from them. She didn't care to talk to her children all the time, she did

Only if you also have a landline phone. In a lot of areas, subsidized phones are cellular, not landline; and even if a person isn't getting a subsidized phone, if money's tight they're likely to only have a cell because they're much more useful in an emergency.

Oh please not the seniors. I hate to be discriminatory but those with a sharp learning curve need some training before they call me. I'm patient and nice but all calls are timed and they blow me out of the water with those long calls. Since I'm in a position of talking to a wide variety of customers every day it really drives home just how poor basic computer education is for the older people who may be one or two generations behind me.

Comcast regularly sells 15/1 service for $20/month. True that goes up after a year, but then you can switch to DSL for a little less. Letting people pay $10 for 1.5/nada internet is hardly doing them a favor--and even they will have to ration their usage or risk having their account terminated for being bandwidth hogs. Not to mention the real price: the rule of law collapsing as TV/movie interests merge into a nasty monopoly controlling a huge piece of the internet market.

Look, if they're going to offer subsidized internet access to low-income households, I think the real move should be to nationalize it altogether. If Comcast and/or the FCC can acknowledge that it is a public right to have affordable internet access for everyone, then it is high time the profit motive were removed from the equation. Oh, wait, you guys completely fucked that up with the national health care plan... carry on with your nihilistic ledger-padding then!

Eh. Every country that has better broadband than us does it via extensive government intervention. Our internet is more expensive and slower, by a considerable margin, than most other countries in the OECD, even when you just look at dense cities. The best internet in the country is in Utah, where government has just rolled out their own fiber.
Markets are great, but they don't really work with utilities. Monopolies, network externalities, economies of scale, etc.

The line providers (Comcast and the like) are actually highly regulated. Their rates are set by local or State regulatory agencies and boards. The company can petition for an increase in subscription prices, but it is Government that basically determines if the price increase is allowed. Since it's already screwed up, I'm not sure how turning everything over to Government would make it better...

Many Slashdot geeks like to act like Internet access hasn't changed in a decade but that is not at all true. You get a lot more for your money. I think about my own history on the net:

I first got a connection in 1996. It was dialup, 28.8k max. That was a little deceptive though as the ISP had only a 28.8 frame relay out, so if more than one person was using it, you got less throughput. It cost $15/month, but also needed a phoneline, which ran about $25/month so around $40/month total, about $55 in today's d

But the point is over all how you are getting lots more for less. I'm not saying the US Internet is the best in the world, I am saying it is not bad and has improved a ton in 15 years.

Also a few other things to consider:

1) Do you really get your promised rate, to all over the place? Something I've seen quite a few times, most particularly with Japanese ISPs but elsewhere too, is that they build a big WAN type of environment where there's a fast connection to the premises and to their stuff, but not to much

The only "progress" most areas of the US see are increasing bills and new bandwidth rationing schemes. My internet has been 10/1 for the past 6 years during which time it has increased in 30% in price to $60 and dropped usenet. In order to pay for such an enormously innovative product, metered pricing is "inevitable" says TWC's CEO.

We like to act like that because it hasn't changed much in the last decade. I'm paying roughly the same amount of money now for the same connection that I was getting over a decade ago when I first got a cable modem. There has been a bit of a decrease in price, but that's been pretty minimal, I was paying $50 or so for a 4mbps connection and now I'm paying $55 a month for a 5mbps connection.

There's a lot of folks around here that aren't able to get more than 1.5mbps even though they live closer to the CO th

Look, if they're going to offer subsidized internet access to low-income households, I think the real move should be to nationalize it altogether.

That'll never happen as we're not socialist enough. If all ISP's were required to be a utility that would at least require approval from a public utility commission to raise rates etc and you would have another means of resolving your service issues.

I pretty much agree with you. Something that gets overlooked frequently is the unserved areas between the cities. There are certainly poor people out there too.

There's no incentive for businesses to run cable/internet out there because the return on investment is too low. Government has stepped in and provided money for infrastructure, but we're a long way from the kind of coverage that's needed.

If the US had real competition you would have providers offering $10 broadband as standard without any income requirements. The rest of the Western world (ex. Canada) seem to be able to manage it. How long is the US going to let themselves be held hostage by the big two providers?

Infrastructure is expensive, which is why it was publicly financed in much of the country. It was then turned over to private enterprise. That's not how capitalism is supposed to function. Public risk and private profit will not create a system that is beneficial to all, or even most.

I'd like to pay a reasonable price for broadband, I'd also like everyone else to have access to it at a reasonable price because I am capable of seeing how enriching the entire society benefits me in the long run.

Wait a minute - I can buy "long distance" phone services from hundreds of different providers once I pay for my $15 basic access phone plan (basically the line charge). Because of that, I pay about 2-3c/minute, versus 25c/min back in the 80s under Ma Bell.

Require the local data service providers to open up to all vendors - or better yet, forbid the line owner from having any legal business connection to the data provider -and you'll see a huge reduction in rates.

That's because we can't take care of it ourselves. We've got precisely two reasonable options around here Century Link and Comcast. Century link gets a bit of a free ride as they just completed their purchase of Qwest, but there is no competition nor is there any way in which people can get around the duopoly that's in place. Satellite, WiMax and cellular are just not adequate substitutions.

I do hope you meant "excluding" Canada, not "example: Canada". In Canada, the absolute cheapest broadband I've seen is a 3meg/256kbit cable connection for $27.95/mo, and that'll still cost you $50 for the installation, and more for the modem purchase. If you already have other services, you can get cheaper (a 512/512 DSL for $24.95, for example... band rate for dry loop makes that one cost more than the cable option above). There's even a cellular provider who will provide you with HSPA for $20/mo if you already have cellular service with them... but that's the caveat: if you already have cellular service with them. That's a minimum $25/mo on top of that (or $20 if you can pay for the whole year in advance). To be fair, that particular provider will sell you unlimited local calling, and no bandwidth limit on the cellular connection for that price, but it's still nowhere near the pricing mentionned in TFA.

As far as I know, there's nobody who will sell you just a broadband Internet connection for anything approaching $10/mo in this country. If somebody can prove me wrong, I would be very interested to hear about it, but Internet is almost as much of a rip-off in Canada as the US.

Perhaps some other countries should be looked at. I'm not sure what he counts as "western" but the UK ought to qualify. I see a deal there for up to 50mbps for $60/month for cable Internet. Requires a 12 month contract. My local cable company offers 50mbps for $90/month with no contract ($60/month gets you 25mbps). In Spain I see 10mbit ADSL and phone service for about $60/month with a 12 month contract. That's in line with what you'd pay either the cable of phone company for similar service here. Italy see

I have Virgin cable, 50mbit/5mbit, but bundled with a budget cable TV package and a phone line (65+ channels, free weekend/evening calls) and it costs me $82/month.

It's been rock solid too - almost no downtime in the 2 years I've had it and no throttling or caps (although there was talk of them introducing throttling at peak times on all traffic, dropping my connection to 37.5mbit at those times, and in exchange for this they increased the upstream from 1mbit to 5mbit, but I think they have quietly dropped

You probably don't notice the throttling because your connection is so fast as to make little to no difference. I also have a 50mbit connection and it really is overkill. For 99% of things, I notice no difference over the 20mbit connection I had before. Both load webpages instantly (I wait for DNS or slow ass ad servers more than pages to load), I can stream HD video and surf no problems, and so on. The only difference I notice is my games on Steam download obscenely fast instead of very fast.

What I meant by that is I have data for it, and there aren't any times of day where the data shows that the connection doesn't max out at 50mbit, either due to a file download, or 3 people watching iPlayer at the same time while someone else downloads etc.

According to their policy [virginmedia.com] you will be throttled for 5 hours, down to 35% of your normal speed, if you upload more than 6000MB between 3-8PM on any given day. So, if max out your upload for two hours and forty minutes, during that 5 hour window, then you will be throttled.

I think you're full of shit, which is probably why you decided to post AC while trolling. When examined from a social welfare point of view, Canada is miles ahead of the US. I doubt you're a Canadian citizen, despite having lived in Canada, and I suspect most or all of your rage at their system of government is because it works, and works well, and your personal ideology says that shouldn't be possible. So instead of learning from them, you hate their system because that's easier than giving up your ideolog

I love the comment on the article from a guy who complains that other customers will have to pay for these accesses for the poors.
God forbid these people have access to internet and be able to raise better educated kids to contribute to society!

Interesting, I do pretty well. Better than most of my peers and for some reason I lean towards liberal. Then again having been to a couple of wars will really give you a little compassion for people that don't have anything. I'm even all boostrappy and whatnot, came from very poor roots and made myself fairly successful. I don't really envy anyone and I'm not particularly greedy as the really poor people I help out can tell you. Granted I'm not going to make myself go broke or anything. So liberal wit

Really? I'm pretty comfortably off, but I'm not deluded enough to believe that this is entirely due to my own endeavours. I am, admittedly, pretty awesome, but I also had a lot of advantages throughout my life. I'm classed as a liberal, because I'd like everyone to have the same opportunities that I had, because I think that would produce a society that I'd like to live in. Is that greed, or greed and envy?

It is still a very odd idea, especially to mandate this as a condition of an acquisition. It's like saying: "you can have your capitalist monopoly and gouge the customer, if we can have our socialist Internet for the disadvantaged, paid out of your profits". If there's not enough competition, they should not allow the acquisition. If Internet access fees are too high for low income families, the government could decide to subsidise it out of their own coffers, which means all taxpaying voters pay for it,

This program probably won't cost Comcast anything--it might even turn a profit. The politicians could have just rubber-stamped the merger like they normally do, but throwing out a little bread to the pauper children is hard to resist, not because the corrupt representatives have socialist convictions (or any convictions at all) but because it is fun.

Read the details: it's ONLY offered to families with young children. If you're single and down on your luck, you're still down on your luck; if you're an older couple with teenaged kids fallen on hard times, tough luck for you, too.

XORb) don't give it at all because for whatever reasons (practical or greedy, probably the later) because they don't plan to give it cheap access to all low income people

You take what you can get and work on it. And you lobby towards more affordable access to all as you travel down the road.

You're forgetting one thing: the lobby is now smaller as a result of picking A. Had we picked B, the lobby would have still been large enough to fight, but now it is smaller and it is less likely to get heard.

It would be interesting to see what the "poor" use the Internet for in a years time. Who here thinks the majority of the time will be spent filling out job applications or Khan Academy? I'm pretty sure YouTube, porn sites, and community flash mob organizing will be the major activities.

Doesn't matter, there's a number of things where you really do need to have an internet connection to do. An increasing number of government agencies don't do anything via the phone anymore and have cut back or eliminated any way of getting in touch in person. I know that around here the Employment Security Department only does things via the internet, and the only accommodations they make for disability is for people that can't use the internet.

This is sad. Where I used to teach there was absolutely NO verification of income for the free lunch program. In fact, it was expressly forbidden to even question the qualification of any application, no matter how obviously egregious the situation. There were strong incentives for the school to qualify as many students as possible, linked to additional federal funding going directly to the school. Somehow I doubt this will be any better supervised.

This six month old story on Ars mentioned more details on the program and 2 of the other major concessions they had to make to get the merger approved. Hiring Meredith Attwell Baker away from the FCC was probably a big help also.

This six month old story on Ars mentioned more details on the program and 2 of the other major concessions they had to make to get the merger approved. Hiring Meredith Attwell Baker away from the FCC was probably a big help also.

"Looks like" is right. Problem is they are only required to offer it in areas where broadband is made available. They have already cherry-picked the market in specific, profitable areas. They don't service non-profitable areas which would be precisely the areas that this requirement would target. That said, "some" families will be able to better afford the services they have now but I didn't read in there that they could change their service plans if they already had one. And "making less than $25k"?

" If internet access is a right, food is a right, a car is a right, a home is a right, a job is a right and so on."

The horrors!

Seriously, rights don't exist in and of themselves. They're just things that society has decided are important and should exist for everyone. In the revolutionary era, freedom of speech was all that we could afford to give to everyone. But as society has gotten richer, they've decided to expand the universe of things that everyone is supposed to have (FDR's "freedom from want",

"Let's not argue about giving everyone a car based on cost, because it's pathetic when compared to things that already exist. The right to a home, the right to a job, the right to medical care and the right to a family... those are the ones that are expensive.

And you know what ? We're simply not able to pay for them. Seriously, if you raised taxes to 100%, and *somehow* this didn't affect the economy, we wouldn't be able to pay for what we currently have. So it's going to disappear"

Numerically, that isn't true. In the Netherlands for example, everyone has access to cheap and high quality medical care, generous family support and free pre-school, access to massive job-retraining programs that have kept unemployment below 4% even in recessions, as well as access to generous crime-free public housing projects. And they do it all with efficient government and slightly higher taxes, while maintaining a smaller debt burden as a percent of GDP and faster GDP growth over the last 20 years. More on topic, they also have faster and cheaper internet!

Conservatives spend so much time fighting the ghosts of hippies from the 70's that they fail look around and realize that other countries have largely solved the public policy problems facing this country and have done so in ways that made their countries stronger. But unfortunately, a lot of the political establishment is more interested in acting tough and serious than they are in actually solving problems.

It doesn't mean it's given to you. It means you are given the opportunity to pursue it without undue harassment by the Gov. In a sense, things that are rights can also be a privilege if there is an associated cost. Really, all rights, natural and otherwise come at a cost. Even freedom is directly free, but in indirectly has a cost in that at some point you have to fight for it.

I personally think this is bad news bears all around. The infrastructure is already spread thin - at least judging by my internet speeds and costs. Last thing we need is a flux of new subscribers that are low-income (read: jobless or underemployed) who have all the time in the world to suck up my precious bandwidth.

If people want internet, they can work for it just like I have to. It's not a necessity to survive. Last thing these people need is another incentive not to succeed.

That was precisely my point.
More simply, a right is something I have b'cos I didn't need to deprive someone else of something in order to get. I don't deprive others of air while breathing, I don't deprive others of speech rights while opining, et al. But if I did, it would no longer be a right.
All the things I listed above - despite the fact that everybody needs them - are not rights, precisely b'cos of the zero-sum-game nature of these things. If they were, farmers would have to give food to anyone

If they were, farmers would have to give food to anyone who wanted it w/o paying for it,

They pretty much already do. Have you seen the prices that farmers get for grain, as opposed to the middleman marketing boards?That box of cornflakes you pay $4.99 for has about 20 cents of corn for the farmer in it.

No, it's not a necessity to survive, but in more and more cases it IS a requirement for kids in school of almost any age. Textbooks are disappearing in class, and the kids are expected to access an online version at home.

It's probably notable that there are conditions on having childrens in age of going to school: I hope you don't suggest young teen and chilren go flipping burgers to pay for DSL because their lazy parents are human wrecks.

Infrastructure spread thin? Your speeds and costs are direct result of the lack of competition in the US ISP market. Here, on the right side of the ocean nobody can even remember the time, when the internet was volume limited or when you had to pay for it more than 20-25 euro.

But hey, what do I know? I'm sure your problem is not the greedy corps trying screw you over, but the poor cloging your tubes...

PS. Purposely ignoring your definition of "rights", because it would only start a flame war.

It's astonishing the doublethink required to support an entitlement mentality like yours, posting on Slashdot and enjoying all of the benefits of being born into a comfortable position in a modern society, and decrying freeloaders who don't have the same advantages as you.

There are multiple types of rights. For example, there are the legal rights that are granted by the political system under which you are governed. If your legal rights are violated, then the government is supposed to enforce your legal rights. I know it doesn't always work that way, which is sad when the right being violated is a good and sensible right.

There are human or moral rights, but unless there's some entity is enforcing them(Wrath of GOD? Or maybe a superhero? ), they're imaginary rights, don't be

How is a 12-year-old required to look at an online assignment, research online, and type a paper going to be able to work to pay for the equipment? Yes, the schools are filled with million-dollar computer labs, but they close when all the teachers rush out the door in the early afternoon. And since Comcast is already rationing customers to a few meager percent of the connections' capacity (in preparation for their merger with a TV/movie company) bandwidth can hardly be a problem.

A right is whatever society defines it as. As technology improves, what we define as a right can be expanded. The question you're getting at is: should it be? By defining a right as the opportunity exercise it without government interference you're saying that it shouldn't. You're advocating a society without progress. This makes sense. You're doing well yourself, and another man's progress risks yours. That's what conservatism is all about. A handful of super rich manipulating frightened people desperately

Thank you. I was beginning to think the whole country forgot what it means to have a Right.

As far as the whole Comcast ordeal, I'm kind of sickened by this. It just means that they told Comcast they can charge people with money whatever they damn well please while the government can mandate who gets Internet for a reduced fee.

What they should be doing is lessening the restrictions on the ISPs in communities and handing over the ownership and upkeep of the fiber to those communities. Start treating fiber

Absolutely! The deal for buying NBC should have been to get Comcast to either get out of the ISP business and maintain the network for independent ISPs to compete with a lease rate that covers cost to maintain the lines at the bandwidth the ISP uses, or hand the ownership of the lines over the communities.

While not a "right" (poor choice of words, dude), I would certainly consider the Internet a "utility" that's fast becoming necessary for living in society. Pretty much like electricity, sewage, natural gas, telephone, trash service, and etc.

It's probably identical to a normal service but with every metric divided by two or some other factor. Why would they put this service on a different architecture when they could simply alter some database records for these customers?

The long term goal would be to move most, if not all, customers to the new protocol (not architecture). Since these would be new customers, they can start them on this, so that they don't need to upgrade later. Other existing customers can be moved to IPv6 whenever they are ready.

Well, as IPv4 addresses become scarce, having a load of customers on IPv6 with NAT64 to access v4 sites may be cheaper. Rolling this out for the people too poor to switch to an alternative service first makes sense from a business standpoint.

seeing how this is rent free will they give out old cable modems that may or may not be able to run IPv6? Comcast still likes to swap / give out old SD only cables boxes and the old MPEG 2 HD only boxes as well. also the router needs to be able to IPv6 as well.

Comcast is in the process of rolling out IPv6 to all areas of the company so I can't see why this would be any different. Bandwidth will be minimal at 1.5 mb per second download and 384 kb per second upload. This program is designed to bring internet to homes that otherwise would not be able to afford the regular rate of 44.95. There are some conditions that apply for this service. Your child must be getting a subsidized school lunch and you are not elligible if you have paid for comcast internet at any oth

My mother only has 1Mb/s, and it's far better than dial-up. Downloading stuff is a bit painful - you actually have to wait or 10MB downloads to arrive - but for normal web browsing and email it's perfectly adequate. The main time I notice the difference is on iPlayer - her connection isn't quite fast enough to stream video. 1.5Mb/s would be. Anyone who thinks that a connection that's fast enough to stream SD video is unbearably slow has been living a very pampered existence.

Way to hate. Do you presume that poor people are also stupid people and/or that non-poor people are smarter? Both presumptions would be ridiculous. People in general are pretty stupid and it doesn't matter which income bracket they fall into. A frikken CEO of X-Company could just as easily be hosting a botnet... worse, he might have half a dozen computers where "The Poor family" might only have one. (Admittedly, there will be thousands if not millions of "Poor familes" to each CEO but that's just how th

He's partially right, though. Your hypothetical CEO will have a dozen boxes, yeah... but they'll likely be top-o-the-line or relatively new stuff, or something his kid may be tinkering with.

As a former poor person (in my case a struggling student), I remember what it was like to scrape up a box out of spare/cast-off parts, running an OS 'borrowed' from someone else. (props to the owners of nwark.com for selling me the bits, and to the idiots at my former employer at the time for clinging tightly to their Wi

If they can afford $10/day for cigarettes, then they can afford a lot of things. The poverty line in the USA is $10,890 for an individual. Someone spending $3,560/year on a luxury item is not poor by any standard measure.

Amen. There is very little real material need in the USA. My wife's work in the public schools has put her in contact with the "parent" type that always has a $35 nail job but "can't pay" for her child's subsidized medication ($1/day or something like that) which is essential for their psychological well-being and ability to learn and avoid becoming a delinquent. We've gotten so bitter about giving to charities that we've basically decided it's got to be some legitimate organization in a foreign country that we know will make sure people are fed (i.e. not anything UN oriented) when giving to poverty-relief groups.

I know a lot of poor smokers and they simply switched to the filtered cigars when the prices got nuts. At a pack a day that is $75 a month or $900 a year. Not anywhere close to what you are quoting friend. Sadly in some neighborhood it is getting cheaper to smoke dope than it is to smoke cigarettes. Didn't we learn anything from prohibition?

As for the Comcast thing? Good luck folks. I know plenty of poor and older folks that tried to get the naked AT&T DSL and for all intents and purposes it don't exist. by the time they got done tacking on fees and requirements and hoop jumping most gave up. I don't think I ever met anyone that actually managed to get it. When the government makes them offer something like this they make sure the bullshit and flaming hoops are so high that you'll just give up. Yeah good luck folks.

and wait till you find out what speed [jaypeeonline.net] they get for their $12. While other nations are busy upgrading their infrastructure to meet consumer bandwidth demands, US' solution to bandwidth problem consists of raising service fees.

well they have more high rises so it's easier to build a CO / RT / NODE just for that one highrise. Comcast will need more nodes and or kill off the rest of the basic analog channels to free up more room. Also SDV can help but to do SDV comcast will need to build out more nodes.